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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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from the book

Peter Gizzi was born on August 7, 1959, and grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. His books include In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011 (Wesleyan University Press, 2014); The Outernationale (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003), Artificial Heart (1998), and Periplum (1992). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into numerous languages.

About his collection Artificial Heart, the critic Marjorie Perloff has said: "In his visionary quest, his raw emotion, and his New York school spontaneity, Gizzi performs a clinamen that relates him to O'Hara, Ashbery, and, beyond these poets, to Rimbaud and Hart Crane.... a master of the mot juste and of sound structure. Most of the book's poems... are as memorable as they are moving and spare."

Gizzi has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

His work as an editor includes o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. He has taught at Brown University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is currently on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Chateau If

Peter Gizzi, 1959

If love if then if now if the flowers of if the conditionalif of arrows the condition of if if to say light to inhabit light if to speak if to live, so if to say it is you if love is if your form is if your waist thatpictures the fluted stem if lavender if in this field if I were to say hummingbird it might behave as anadjective here if not if the heart’s a flutter if nerves map a city if a cityon fire if I say myself am I saying myself (if in this instant) as ifthe object of your gaze if in a sentence about love you mightwrite if one day if you would, so if to say myself if in this instance if to speak asanother— if only to render if in time and accept if to live now as ifdisembodied from the actual handwritten letters m-y-s-e-l-f if a creature if what you say if only to embroider—acity that overtakes the city I write.

Peter Gizzi

by this poet

I've spent my life
in a lone mechanical whine,
this combustion far off.
How fathomless to be
embedded in glacial ice,
what piece of self hiding there.
I am not sure about meaning
but understand the wave.
No more Novalis out loud.
No Juan de la Cruz singing
"I do not die to die."
No solstice, midhaven

You stand far from the crowd, adjacent to power.
You consider the edge as well as the frame.
You consider beauty, depth of field, lighting
to understand the field, the crowd.
Late into the day, the atmosphere explodes
and revolution, well, revolution is everything.
You begin to see for the first time
everything

A cornerstone. Marble pilings. Curbstones and brick.I saw rooftops. The sun after a rain shower.Liz, there are children in clumsy jackets. Cobblestones and the sun now in a curbside pool.I will call in an hour where you are sleeping. I’ve been walking for 7 hrs on yr